Saturday, April 28, 2012

If you are going to start a mobile car washing company or a
mobile detailing company the first thing you need to decide is if you
should get a trailer, or some sort of skid unit put in the back of your
pickup. Most people like to tow trailers because they can unhook the
trailer at the end of the day and still use the truck as their personal
vehicle. That makes sense right?
Sure it does, and that's why so
many people do it that way. Now then, let's talk about some of the
challenges when towing a mobile car washing rig with 100 gallons or 200
gallon water tank.
It doesn't matter if you have a large water
tank inside of a vehicle or on a trailer, that much water swishing
around can be a problem. Water tanks on trailers and in trucks or vans
are much more dangerous when they are half full, especially if they do
not have any baffles. If you come to a stop and the water is still
moving back and forth, it can hurt the gears in your transmission,
eventually your transmission will fail.
It is also very hard on
the brakes, and it takes a lot more power to stop the kinetic energy
caused by the movement of the water, and the extra weight of the
vehicle. Worse, when it's raining things can get rather dangerous. When
the roads are slick, the stopping distance is very poor and it's easy to
have a trailer jackknife or have your van or truck slide sideways. It's
hard to stop in intersections and it's easy to slide on those large
cross-walk markings which are very slick when wet.
Attempting to
tow with a vehicle that weighs less than the trailer is not wise without
trailer brakes, both surge and/or electric. Let's say you are towing a
mobile detail trailer with a half ton or three-quarter ton pickup. If
the trailer weighs 1200 pounds, and 200 gallons of water weighs 8 pounds
per gallon, now you have 2800 pounds, plus the other equipment and
whatever is in the back of your pickup truck. If your trailer isn't
perfectly balanced, it could easily cause you to jackknife when turning a
corner and hitting the brakes.
Sometimes it makes sense to get a
tandem axle trailer which distributes the weight over a larger area,
making it much safer. However there are problems with tandem actual
trailers as well. Tandem axle trailers rip apart tires, and that costs
money. They especially wear quickly if you are making lots of turns in
parking lots or in fleet vehicle areas. Therefore, it makes sense to
make sharp corners at very slow speeds so that when you are dragging the
back wheels on a tandem trailer, you are not taking the tread with you.
Indeed,
I hope you will please consider all this and think on it, because over
the years I've seen far too many accidents, increased insurance
premiums, blown out tires, dented front ends, and costly repair bills.

Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, http://www.carwashguys.com and now runs the Online Think Tank.
Lance Winslow believes writing 24,222 articles by July 22, 2011 at 2:22
PM is going to be difficult because all the letters on his keyboard are
now worn off now..